Electronic communication, such as email, is now widely used for business purposes. Many businesses store certain electronic communications according to data retention policies. Furthermore, businesses may be required by law to store certain electronic communications. These retained communications may later be used in legal proceedings.
However, electronic communications that include text, audio, image, and video data may easily be edited, resulting in various levels of consumer data manipulation. Thus, the integrity of text, audio, video, etc. data cannot be trusted. With government and law enforcement agencies increasingly utilizing digital document, photographs, videos, and audio recordings, the problems associated with the lack of reliable indicators of integrity becomes more acute.
Many data management systems have been proposed and implemented in the past. These data management systems include systems that store documents, electronic photographs, digital music, as well as other data, and respond to a variety of requests. However, these systems do not easily operate across organizational boundaries and do not perform necessary synchronization and verification e.g., in the case of an audit.
A log is a data management tool used to record information. Logs may use a client-server framework to permit the addition or subtraction of content from one or more client locations to a server that hosts the web log. Because one server hosts each log, web logs are typically anchored to a particular HTTP location.
Logs are designed to provide a reliable history which in turn provides the basis of trust. Current business processes such as double entry accounting and paper trails provide traceability and support for auditing. Verification of electronic log files is necessary to provide similar accountability to that provided by paper. Verification of logs is critical in ensuring the integrity of a log, the log's history, and content referenced by the log.